


Old Friends and New

by PositivelyVexed



Category: Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Backstory, Crossover, Friendship, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-14 16:27:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21156506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/pseuds/PositivelyVexed
Summary: Warren gets word of an old bounty hunter friend working the area, and decides to catch up with him. Tracking him down isn't too hard. Explaining what he's been up to lately is significantly harder.





	Old Friends and New

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).

Warren’d heard rumors of another man looked a lot like him doing bounty killing in the West for the past couple months. Gossip said he was dressed to the nines, riding a horse, mighty well-armed, and most definitely black. _ Not _ Warren himself. That seemed to mean only one thing. 

Still, Warren was cautious. He figured maybe he was just getting old and imagining the world for smaller than it really was. It could have been someone new to the game. And surely there was a certain charm in that, imagining black bounty hunters multiplying across the country. Mannix’s eyes sure got wide when he overheard one of the rumors, a little kick of satisfaction going through Warren with each flick of his eyes sideways at Warren.

He didn’t jump to any conclusions until the bounty on some multiple murderer—some hotheaded drunk who'd taken an axe with him to church one Sunday morning and settled his grudges with his neighbors in a most unchristian way—took them out near Rapid City. There, Mannix was able to wheedle the news that their fugitive had already been turned up and shot down by another bounty hunter.

“Big black feller, like your friend over there,” the older lady behind the general store counter whispered to Mannix, eyes narrowed at Warren, like Warren’s eyes being fixed on the view out the window made him hard of hearing. “Older like him, too. Imposing. No beard or uniform, but oh—he moved in such a _threatening_ manner.”

Chris thanked the woman, and the two of them walked out of the shop, sat on the rickety loose boards of the front stoop.

“Well this turned out to be a fucking waste of time,” Chris said, turning to Warren. “So what was all that about another black bounty hunter? You got a twin went into bounty hunting, major? Or you been sneaking out, turning men in behind my back?”

Warren rolled his eyes. “Yeah. This beard’s just been stuck on with glue this whole time.”

Warren leaned back, tried to ignore Chris’s legs sprawling out across the steps up to the general store, the way his knee brushed up against Warren’s and then flinching away when he remembered folks could see. He studied the faint remnants of grass stains on the knees of Chris’s trousers, the ones Chris bitched about not being able to get out, though he still wore them everywhere. Got his mind back on track, then said, “Think I may want to pay the sheriff a visit when he gets back in town, ask him a little more about this bounty hunter.”

They waited around a couple hours, and the sheriff proved talkative enough once Warren convinced him he wasn’t trying to start any trouble. Once he was satisfied that his instincts were correct, Warren got up, went outside, started checking the saddlebags on his horse.

Chris, who'd fucked off somewhere during the first hour, appeared behind him, his eyebrows drawn together in a puzzled little crease above his nose. “I don’t know what you’re thinking of doing, but I’m getting dinner and bedding down here, major. I got us a room in the hotel. My ass is about numb from riding, and I’d just as soon take a constitutional after tracking this bastard two hundred miles and having _shit_ to show for it.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ”I got us a standalone cabin out back. No one’s going to disturb us out there.”

Warren rolled his eyes. White boy was fixated on not getting overheard, though that didn’t stop him from gasping and mewling when he got close. It just meant he threw increasingly careless sums of money at rooms he hoped offered some extra measure of privacy. Still and all, hot dinner and a hot fire and bending Mannix over the bed did sound like a nice way to finish off this snipe hunt of a job. Under different circumstances, he'd be happy to end the day here.

Warren shrugged. “You can enjoy that room fully undisturbed. I got someone I want to find tonight.”

That had about the effect he’d anticipated. Mannix bristled up at the implication there was someone Warren was more interested in than his patsy white self, and Warren’d be lying if the offense didn’t make him smile a little. “Oh, I see,” Mannix said, pepper in his voice. “Someone you got to see tonight? Were you gonna tell me that, or were you just gonna let me find out for myself when you fucked off to wherever?” 

“Didn’t really cross my mind.”

Mannix scoffed. “Oh, I’m sure it didn’t, major. Too busy thinking about your long lost twin out there?”

He said it like he thought he was sly for figuring it out. Give it to Mannix to think drawing a line between the only two points one the page was clever. “You want to come along and learn, you’re welcome to, but I don’t much care either way.”

Mannix frowned. “Like hell you don’t. I’m coming.”

Once they mounted up and rode out, Mannix kept quiet for a minute at most before asking, “So who is he? Some motherfucker you need help killing?” 

Warren rolled his eyes. He guessed Chris Mannix was being purposely obtuse. “Now Chris Mannix, what do you think?”

“I think you got a lot more enemies than close personal friends wandering around on this earth, especially in this business,” he said with composure.

“I don’t know about close,” Warren said. “But he is an old friend. Come on, we got a ways to go.”

Warren’s first instinct, he had to admit, back when he'd first guessed who they were following, was to steer clear.

He’d just about gotten used to traveling with Mannix, and he liked the effect Mannix’s presence generally had on things. The west with all its myriad armed white folks was a powder keg to travel around at the best of times—Warren did it anyway, because he liked the work and he was a bloody-minded old bastard, but that didn’t mean he was wholly averse to some oily-tongued hillbilly greasing the skids with the local populace.

But the situation with Mannix defied easy explanation, and he didn’t much like the idea of trying to explain just what the hell he thought he was doing, when he hadn’t been able to work that out himself. The truth was, there were precious few people on this earth whose approval mattered in any way to him. Most of those few were long since dead. Then there was Django Freeman. They had never been close, but Warren had liked him since before he met him. They had a bond built less on liking than on the blood-slicked, tightened coils of shared hatred for the same enemies, and admiration for the other’s ability to survive, and a bone deep knowledge of just how hard-won it came.

Looked at from a certain angle—the angle a white man might look at it from—Warren supposed something similar might be said of him and Mannix. But that wasn’t really the same thing at all.

Which was a long, roundabout way of saying he had no idea how he was going to explain himself and the Mannix situation when he caught up to Django Freeman. Still, Warren didn’t have so many old friends left anywhere in the world that he was going to let Chris fucking Mannix’s presence dissuade him from seeing one.

“So who’s this asshole you’re so hellbent on dragging us through the rain to see?” Chris asked. And then, like he was answering himself, he added, “he’s black.”

“Yep,” said Warren, enjoying the little touch of unease in Mannix’s voice.

“An old, black friend.”

“Yeah. Though he probably won’t be that for much longer, once he sees who I’m traveling with.”

That seemed to lift Mannix’s spirits up some, like he thought it was only fair that Warren should have to lose friends over whatever the fuck this was too.

So Warren felt moved to add, “Course, I suppose I could get in his good graces again easily enough. You don’t have a bounty on you, but he’s like me. Always willing to work off the clock, the right man with blood on his hands happens across his path.”

Mannix’s face clouded, and he pursed his lips so tight they seemed nearly in danger of disappearing into his face entirely. “You mean to tell me there’s been another black bounty hunter working these parts?”

“I didn’t know he was in these parts till now, but yeah, it appears so.”

“He some new upstart? Thinks he can muscle in on your territory?” Warren liked that little touch of outrage on Warren’s behalf, or would have, if he didn’t suspect it was really unease Mannix felt for his own white skin.

“Nope. He’s been at it even longer than I have.”

Mannix fell back a bit on his horse, like he forgot to urge his mare on for a moment. “Well how come I haven’t heard of him then?” he asked.

“Oh, you have.”

Mannix frowned, puzzling over that one like it was a riddle. “Major, the only other black bounty hunter I ever so much as heard tell of--”

And this time he did forget to urge his horse on, falling back several paces before rousing himself.

“Major, no. I _know_ that's not who you mean. He’s dead.”

“Dumbass, we’re dead too, at least according to the papers back East. Lots of stories get garbled in the telling between East and West. Wishful thinking gets mistaken for fact.”

The wide-eyed, startled look Chris shot him made Warren suddenly glad he’d brought him along. Whatever else this was, Chris Mannix's discomfort seemed likely to prove entertaining.

Warren knew from past experience that the town had two places to stay, one a rowdy gaslit two-story in the center of main street, and a far humbler one on the far side of town, surrounded by tar paper shacks on all sides. Mannix still seemed surprised as to which one they ended up at, and Warren was sorely tempted to punch him in the face for his look of disappointment. 

The smokey, mostly empty saloon was near closed when they stepped inside, and all but cleared out. For a moment Warren thought he’d missed him, but he craned his neck around the tall booths, and there he was sitting in the corner. Older, a bit heavier, hair a little grayer. He turned his head at the sound of the door, and from across the room, Warren could see his eyes flicker with recognition at him. A subtle, barely perceptible sizing up first of Warren and then of Mannix, took place, one that held all manner of questions and just the barest flicker of relish, like the evening’s entertainment had a arrived a few minutes late, but arrived just the same. 

“Well, well, Marquis. Been a minute.”

“Been too damn long’s what it’s been,” Warren said, slapping him on the shoulder and shaking his hand. Didn’t have to look behind him to guess Mannix was drifting behind him listlessly like an unmoored boat.

Django stood, and the hug he gave him was just as strong, though maybe a little less warm, which Warren had to concede was only fair. 

A slightly-built black woman who might have been the proprietress nodded at them, and Warren greeted her warmly too. Asked if they were still serving food. 

“Grandpa’s making it. It’s his call,” she said. Behind the counter, a hunched older black man in an apron called out, “Got to order it now if you want it.” 

“There you have it,” the lady said, turning to Warren, and they hadn't ridden all day for nothing, so he ordered a couple of steaks, because why not, and a bottle of brandy for all three of them to share. 

Mannix was standing there wide-eyed, looking lost, like he’d never once in his life been in a room where black folks—free black folks, at least—outnumbered white. He was staring about it him like he’d been transported to another world.

Gratifying as Mannix’s discomfort always was, Warren tore his attention away, eyed up Django. Jesus, it’d been six, seven years? Warren’d barely been getting himself established in those days, mostly because he wasn’t ready to let a little thing like the war being over folks stop him from killing Rebels, and Django Freeman had been the only man in the business whose opinion he cared about. They’d met off and on a lot more frequently back in those early days. Their acquaintance went back much further than that, though. To before the War. 

“What the hell you been up to?” Django asked.

With a little prompting—and what an unfamiliar luxury it was, to be conversing with a man who didn’t take a mile for every conversational inch he was given—Django—who’d always insisted on Django, even though Warren was generally disinclined to first-name a black man he held in such high regard—gave him the update. How his people were and what they were up to, how business was, who was dead in the bounty hunting game and who’d realized they could make more money going back to working on the other side. Warren asked after this or that old mutual friend from the war that he’d lost track of, and Django did the same, keeping cool and poker-faced about that wide-eyed white boy standing there, gawping open-mouthed at the two of them.

Anything but poker-faced, Chris stood off to the side, looking like he was waging some internal battle between his natural inclination to inject himself into any conversation in the vicinity, and to stand back, listen to what was being said and get his bearings in this rapidly shifting new landscape. Warren decided Chris Mannix didn’t deserve to get his bearings. Didn’t even deserve the steak, but Warren’d already fucked up there.

"Get over here, Chris," he said. And Django's eyebrows shot up at that.

"You don't get to tell me what to do," Chris said, but he walked over anyway like it was in his blood. Warren decided to stall, though. Keep the suspense up a bit longer.

“On the subject of bounty hunters left the game, John Ruth is gone.”

“I heard.” Django said, a faint quirk to his lip like he could see what Warren was doing, and was willing to humor him this once.

“You know I was there when it happened?”

“Heard something of the sort. I'd say I was sorry to hear he's gone, but I’d never made up my mind quite how I felt about old John Ruth,” Django said.

Warren glanced at Chris, who looked to full to bursting with opinions and insights to share, but kept his mouth shut on Warren's say-so. “He was a bit of a bastard," Warren said, "But an honest bastard, and he deserved better than the end he got. Even if I’m still inclined to tell him ‘I told you so’ since I got a bullet permanently lodged in my leg thanks to him and that hard-on for the hangman he always had.”

“A bullet in the leg don't sound so good, but considering I heard you died along with John Ruth....”

“These yellow journals will print anything. They’ve been reporting your death since, what, 1858?”

“'54,” Django crossed his arms over his chest, small easy smile on his lips. “Makes my job easier every time they do it too.”

They sat and clicked their glasses of brandy together. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Mannix standing fixed to the spot, out of either some misplaced sense of pride or some sense of deference to Warren. 

“Naw. Didn’t die. But I came closer than I would have liked, saw some ugly shit. That’s where he comes in.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Chris, who straightened up like a dog that heard its name being called. “Django Freeman, meet Chris Mannix. My junior partner.”

Warren tried to savor the scene: the uneasy smile on Chris’s face as he sized up Django Freeman—none of that goofy giddiness he’d had on his face when he’d recognized Warren, no sir, it looked wary and maybe just a bit resentful, though he was trying to smooth over it with Southern politeness, like a rotten egg dipped in honey. Chris pasted a smile that he maybe thought was winning on. “Oh, I’ve heard stories about the Black Butcher. He killed my very own kin.”

Dropped it like he was launching a grenade, although to look at Django, he seemed more surprised by the southern fried voice, and raised his eyebrows at Warren. Django had the carefully arranged face of a man that knew very well he was being watched but preferred to keep his thoughts to himself, but he did allow a small, cool smile to flicker across his face like a snake across the sand. Warren’d always admired that in the man.

Warren flicked a glance at Chris Mannix. Chris smiled sweetly, raising his hands, showing he could be peaceable. “Course, I don’t hold a grudge on that,” Chris said all conciliatory. “I barely knew the man. I was still young when I heard that Cousin Billy was gunned down and burned alive by the man you see before us. Though you can imagine it tore my grandma up sorely to hear it.”

Like anyone in the room gave a fuck about whether a twenty-foot gator tore Chris Mannix’s grandma up.

“I think my partnership with the Major here shows that I can put that behind me. I ain’t been at this as long as you or the Major have, but I like to think I’ve proven myself to the Major’s satisfaction.” He was eyeing Django carefully after that speech--a funny little side-eye that seemed determined to convey, all at once, his disapproval of Django having lit up some slaver kin of his, his willingness to not start anything over that disapproval, and some kind of funny jealousy, like he thought Django was failing to take into account just how very close they were.

Warren snorted. Still, Chris talking about proving himself to Warren’s satisfaction—making it clear who was serving at the pleasure of who—that did stir something in his belly that had a straight line to his cock.

“I don’t know about satisfaction, but he’s my partner, all right, and he’s proved himself useful a few times."

"Well, I sure didn't expect you to take on a partner like him." Django gazed between them, a cool look that said he wasn't going to gratify Warren with any more surprise than he was currently showing. "Though I suppose there's something right to it. You two do at least have _that_ in common."

"This is the first I've heard of his burnt-up cousin, so I never thought about it before, but I suppose you're right," Warren mused. Turned the thought over in his head. Decided he liked it.

"What the hell are you talking about?" Chris Mannix snapped, frowning between the two of them, making it clear he didn't like being a part of a conversation he couldn't keep up with.

"I killed his daddy too," Django said casually, nodding at Warren. Warren nodded, shrugged, let the smile that came naturally at those words spread wide across his face.

Chris Mannix stared between the two of them for a moment, unable to hide the shock as his gaze swung between the two.

"You sure seem pleased about that," Chris Mannix said tartly, looking offended all to hell at this show of patricidal glee, and whatever part of the conversation he was missing. He scrunched his face up. His eyes widened a second later. "Was your daddy a white man, major?" he sounded scandalized, like he'd never heard tell of such a thing, which made Warren feel a flush of real anger at him, but he kept his cool.

"Not to look at him," Warren said. He'd happily reflect all day long on the man's death, but reflecting on the man himself brought up memories Warren'd just as soon keep buried. "He was the sort of black man your daddy could love, and I can't think of anything lower for a black man to be than that. Or a white man, come to think of it."

Chris's eyes narrowed, and his fingers, which had already been gripping the table with a kind of white-knuckled ferocity, started to tremble slightly. Warren figured they'd fight about this for sure afterward, but he wasn't letting Chris let loose with any bullshit here in front of friends and friendly folk, and Chris seemed smart enough to realize that.

His grip loosened, and he went for poisoned honey again. "Well, then, I guess in your book, I must be a truly upstanding man these days."

Warren smirked, and the tension in the room dissipated. Django glanced between the two of them, like he was trying to catch a glimpse of whatever sparks were jumping between the two of them.

"Chris does know when to make himself useful," Warren continued. "Knows when to make himself scarce and put the horses away for the night, too.” Warren wasn't feeling so subtle just now.

“Oh, I do, if the Major asks like a man with some decency and manners—”

“Chris.”

“And sometimes I just continue carrying the burden of being the _ responsible _ one and put the horses away myself because I'm the only one who will,” Chris said, heaving himself up like the whole weight of the world pressed back against him, and he disappeared out the door in a flurry of prim disapproval. Once the door swung shut, Django leaned back, fixed Warren with a steady gaze, unreadable as the Sphinx. Just a faint lift of one eyebrow that said, _Go ahead, you got some explaining to do._

“Finally some quiet,” Warren said, sliding the brandy bottle back across the table for a refill. He raised another toast to Django and tipped the glass up to his lips, taking his time. A story this strange was a kind of currency, and it was never did to spend it too quickly. “You’ll get your explanation, asshole. But first I’m going to help myself to a glass of this brandy, and toast our continuing survival in this trade.”

Once he was feeling a bit warmed by the brandy and fire, and once they’d reminisced about the war a bit and he’d satisfied his curiosity about how Django had beat them to the punch on that axe murderer, he decided enough was enough. He laid out the whole story for Django’s perusal. The stagecoach ride, the blizzard, the ambush, the nearly dying together, his implausible salvation at Chris Mannix’s hands, somehow finding the strength to dig the bullets out of them and stitch them up, wait out the storm, ride them back to civilization. They’d both been assumed dead for a week by the time they rolled in, with the rest of the actually-very-dead occupants of Minnie’s stacked in the stagecoach like matchsticks.

He told the story well, and he took pleasure in doing a good job of it, with Django chuckling in all the right places and shaking his head at all the right twists. Somehow, he wasn't quite a good enough storyteller, though, because when it came time to explain how Chris Mannix had talked him into taking him on as a junior partner in bounty hunting, it didn’t even sound all that plausible to him, much less Django. Like a contrived situation cooked up by some pulp novelist who was only glancingly familiar with how men with an ounce of self-preservation thought.

“You mean to tell me you teamed up with Erskine Mannix’s son because he saved your life?”

He instinctively reached for a lie, and then decided not to. Few people inspired anything like honesty in him, but Django was one. Chris Mannix, funny enough, was another. “It’s a complicated situation.”

Django leaned in, pitched his voice low enough that no one else would hear them over the sound of kitchen work. “If you’re trying to say you’re fucking him, I already figured that much.”

Warren’s hand stiffened around his drink, and his left hand traveled, by years of honed instinct, to his gun, before his brain caught up before it moved more than an inch.

Django shrugged. “Not trying to pick a fight by saying it so plainly. Just puzzled. You ain’t ever seemed ashamed of your inclinations—”

“Ain’t shameful for me, no. Though I’m reliably told some might disagree.”

“It don’t concern me where another man likes to get up to as long as he don’t _ make _ it concern me.” Django tapped a finger on the table. Still cool. “But I’m pretty damn sure you ain’t the only black motherfucker out there with a bent towards pecker, so I’m still not sure why you’d need to cozy on up to a goddamn _ Mannix _ just to get some.”

He looked back in his chair, eyes sliding over him. It made Warren feel seen through in some way he didn’t quite like, but he held his gaze out of sheer defiance. Django's eyes were searching. Like he was suddenly seeing some of Warren's daddy in him, and for a moment, that lanced him deep. The sensation hurt in a way he hadn't thought he was capable of still being hurt.

“I’m not sure there’s too much sense to be found in it, and I’ve looked,” Warren said evenly. “But there’s reasons for it.” He paused. Searching for the right words. Struggling to explain, an uncanny sensation he didn’t much like. Warren frowned. “You remember how we met?”

Django chuckled, a fond look in his eye. “Not likely to forget a thing like that. You were the first person who ever told me he wanted to buy me a drink because I’d killed his daddy.”

Warren nodded, eyes bright. Thinking back to that night. How he’d asked what he wanted to drink, because whatever it was, Warren was buying. ‘Told myself the moment I read the news that I’d buy you a drink if I ever met you.’ How hard he laughed and slapped the table when Django’d told the parts of his daddy’s death that didn’t make the paper, shooting his kneecaps one by one, how he’d howled and swore down vengeance that never came. Even laughing as hard as he did at all that, he’d noticed the uneasy way Django’d been eyeing him up and down all night. Possibly noticing that resemblance that most people said was so strong, though it dispersed, bit by bit, over the course of that night, swapping stories of dead Southern slavers like they were cigarette cards. It was the sort of thing that made two men friends, and sealed that bond, even if they’d only seen each other a scant few times in the years since.

“Then you know looks ain't everything. I ain’t ever gonna be my Daddy’s son. I take an abiding pleasure in being every possible thing my daddy would have hated." He shrugged. "Except stupid."

"All of which I know," Django said. "Known that about you a long time."

"Then maybe you can understand that there's a certain sweet thrill in taking Erskine Mannix’s son and twisting him around till he’s every bit as much something his daddy would have hated.”

“I ain't saying the impulse's not understandable,” Django allowed carefully. "I'm just doubtful you can do it. That boy is what he is. And there's only so much corrupting even you can do to make him anything else."

Warren sighed. That was the deep question, wasn't it? And Warren didn't know how to answer that. Not without spending a day unpacking everything that'd passed between them, the funny-uncanny blood-drenched need Mannix had to please, that seemed to go deeper than lust, deeper even than loyalty. He felt it, but there was no explaining it to outside observers. From outside, it just looked like foolishness, and he still wasn't sure that wasn't what a large portion of it was.

Django looked at him, swirled his brandy in his glass a few moments before taking a sip, a gesture that somehow conveyed that if nothing else, Django was done busting his balls.

“Can’t say I disapprove of the idea of corrupting Erskine Mannix’s boy. I'd just hate to see you get foolish. Start trusting him more than he's worth."

"I wouldn't do that. Believe me, I got no trouble holding that boy at arm's length."

Django sighed, looked at him. "When you're riding and sleeping and working and cooking with a man day in and day out for nine months, you get to know any man like that real well. You get to feeling something about him, one way or another.” Warren blinked at him, watching Django’s eyes flicker with something like genuine feeling. “You feel something when he dies.”

“I ain't saying I'll feel nothing. But... hell, you ever think it’s really important to kill him, I’ll step aside.”

“Uh-huh,” said Django. “You mean to tell me, I pull out this revolver and shoot that motherfucker in the rosy-cheeked face when he walks back in, you ain’t going to do one goddamn thing to stop me? This boy you like fucking so much that you made him your partner for the better part of a year?”

“I wouldn't disapprove of you on principle,” Warren said calmly, though his skin on his face suddenly felt uncommonly hot and tight. “But consider this—“

Django smirked and stretched his arms out over the back of the booth. “Here we go.”

“Consider this,” Warren averred, “I've killed plenty of these peckerwoods. There's a hell of a lot of power in that. But what's real power is having one who’ll do that killing for me on my say-so. Follow at my beck and call, killing southern white men and peddling their flesh with the blessings of the law. That ain’t just satisfying, that’s goddamn poetry. Of course I feel something about that.”

Django was shaking his head, a small smirk on his face. “I can’t _ believe _ you used to give me shit for being partners with a white man.”

Warren waved his hand. “That was a different sort of thing. All I said was I wouldn’t have tolerated working with a motherfucker used to hold a piece of paper that said he _owned _me. That’s a thing that’d poison any friendship I ever tried to have with a man.”

“And what’s better, in your eyes, is fucking a genuine son of Erskine Mannix. Because you’re sure you’ve got him by the balls.” There was no rancor in his voice. “Marquis. Always had your own way of seeing the world.” They regarded each other, an impenetrable gap between them that, Warren saw, couldn’t quite be bridged by any amount of fondness or shared history. That seemed all right, for the moment. The smile playing on Django's face at least gave Warren some confidence that the fondness remained, as little sense as Warren made to him. As little sense as Warren made to himself, if he looked too hard. 

Django leaned in a minute later. “Admit it, though. It would bother you if I killed him.”

Warren weighed that in his hands, then dropped it lightly. “Let’s say I'm set in my ways, and accustomed to certain indulgences he offers.”

Django looked him over. He was giving him that bounty hunter’s once-over, sizing up Warren like he was some informant who might be bullshitting him. Warren didn’t much appreciate it, but he supposed he would have done the same, their positions were reversed.

“You still a master bullshitter, Marquis.” Django said.

“And I see by those glasses on that chain that you’re still wearing sunglasses when you shoot a gun, like a jackass. Ain’t that ruined your eyes yet?” Django, acting aside, had always seemed like a puzzlingly straightforward man once you peeled away the pokerface. Something about it'd always filled him with unease and just a little bit of dumbass schoolboy awe.

Warren looked at his nails. “Maybe it would bother me. You got to consider that I’m getting too old to go out and find a man sucks my cock the way I like it every day. But that ain’t the same thing as saying you’d be wrong to do it.”

“But you ain’t going to do it yourself.”

“No plans to, no.”

As he spoke, the proprietress came over with the steak dinners. As if he’d smelled it through the walls, Mannix stomped into the restaurant, pink in the cheeks from the wind, shaking raindrops off his jacket. Mannix flushed up, glancing at Django and the woman, who was trying not to look curiously at him. Warren’d seen him blush plenty at being told what to do before, but there was some special pleasure in doing it here and now.

“White boy. Get over here.”

Chris scowled. "I ain't at your beck and call, major." He hunched his shoulders, like he could convey his disapproval through that alone, came over, sat down beside Warren, and looked down at the steak.

"So, ah, Mr. Freeman," he said lightly. "Has this motherfucker always been as bossy as he is now?"

"Just about, yeah."

That seemed to cheer Chris up, and he dug into his steak with relish, brandishing a piece of meat on his fork. "So tell me about this church axe murderer. How'd you catch him out from underneath us, if that ain't some kind of trade secret?" Django was still looking at him with a vaguely nonplussed gaze, like he couldn’t believe who he’d just sat down to dinner with, but he told the story, or at least some variation of it that could pass for the truth. 

When the dinner was over, Chris Mannix stretched.

“We gonna get going or we staying the night?” he asked. "I'm about dead on my feet."

Warren glanced at Django, who was arching an eyebrow at the hopeful tone in Chris's voice, then glanced at the proprietress, who’d been patiently waiting, still trying not to stare at the two of them. “Shit, I'm about dead on my feet too. Staying the night, if these folks have a room for us.”

“Sure, clean one's in the back.”

Mannix perked up, like the realization he might get his hot fire and hot fuck with Major Warren after all was enough to rub the sleep out of his eyes. 

“Then I'll guess I'll be seeing you tomorrow, Marquis,” Django said to Warren. "Before we head out."

He looked at Chris, seemed to consider saying something, then just nodded. 

“_He _gets to call you Marquis?” Chris muttered under his breath after they'd been shown to their room and closed the door.

“Yes, he does. He’s an old friend. And an equal.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

Warren closed the distance between them with one step and put his hand around Chris’s neck, liking the way he squirmed, equal parts trying to get him to increase the pressure while trying to convince Warren, or maybe just himself, that he was trying to squirm free. “I’ll let you figure that one out.”

Chris gave up struggling and swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing under Warren’s palm. “What’d you talk about while I was gone?” he asked with false brightness, like he wasn’t wriggling under Warren's chokehold and getting hard from it.

“Talked about killing you.”

Chris rolled his eyes. “No surprise there.”

“Talked about why I keep you around.”

“Oh, and why’s that, major? I can't _imagine_,” Mannix slid his leg between Warren's, his knee bumping up against his thighs.

“Corrupting you,” he said, slipping his hand in Chris’s pants, enjoying the little gasp that escaped his throat as he closed his hand around his cock.

Chris sighed, and squirmed. “Oh. Is that what this is?”

“Doesn't it feel like it?”

“I'll say it does,” said Mannix, breath hitching in his throat and fingers slipping towards Warren's belt buckle, like they couldn't stand to wait. "And that's _all_ it is, I suppose?"

Warren shoved him down to his knees, let him bang himself up on the floorboards. Kept his hand around Chris's neck, feeling his pulse throb beneath his thumb as Mannix got his cock free and got his mouth around it without hesitation, sending a spreading shock of warmth through his belly. "Suppose it's hard to say, sometimes. But maybe not all."


End file.
